360iDev Impressions - Day 3

November 11, 2010    

Day 3 started an hour later (to give us time to recover from the party or the Game Jam or (for some crazed souls) both). We went through a review of the people that wanted to present their apps. Lots of very impressive accomplishments for such a short time.

Next, I went to Brandon Alexander’s talk on Interface Builder. It was a rough talk (like Time Burk’s the previous day) because there were obviously some Interface Builder experts int he audience, as well as some people who don’t seem to have ever used it before. I learned about creating new classes in Interface Builder (which will save me some time), and he talked a little bit about Internationalization and did a helpful example on tableviews. A lot of the class ended up being review for the people that didn’t raise their hands that they’d used IB before, though.

Lunch was Stu Stern from Gorilla Logic talking about their FoneMonkey interface test tool. I don’t believe I’ve never heard of this thing. Some people in the audience didn’t get it (which is pretty typical in my experience - some developers find testing useful and some don’t - I’m one of the ones that does). I’ve downloaded it and will be playing with it the next couple of days. I’m expecting it to save me a ton of time and headache.

Next was Jiva DeVoe’s talk on Classes. This was a very hands-on and very practical explanation of Categories and Protocols and when to use them and how they help your code. I’m really glad I went to this one.

For my last class of the Conference, I chose Jen Harvey’s class on “The Reluctant Sysadmin”. She’s the other half of the HeyTell team, which is a very heavily networked product. It was a whirlwind tour of the different pieces that make up their infrastructure, and an honest discussion of some of the mistakes they’ve made. I learned about quite a few services I hadn’t dealt with before, and feel I have a better shot at avoiding some of those mistakes if I end up deciding to make a more heavily-networked app.

Last was Saurik’s talk on Apps. Openness, Jail-breaking. It was very interesting, I learned a lot. He took some difficult questions from some of the more Jail-breaking adverse developers in the crowd. PErsonally, I’m indebted to his services because I have fewer iOS test devices than I have versions of iOS that I need to test my apps on, so I am often having to downgrade my test devices - which is something Apple refuses to let me do.